Although many players find its combination of resource management, politicking and raw capitalism too rich for their blood or too demanding for their diaries, EVE Online creates some of the best stories in the world of gaming. The tens of thousands of dollars poured into beautiful battleships which are then reduced to scrap? That's EVE Online. Or the Ponzi scheme set up by two entrepreneurial conmen, who gathered 300 investors a week and vanished with the real-world equivalent of over $20,000? Also EVE.

There is a particular form of mastery of EVE Online that requires the same eye for detail and high-functioning sociopathy that marks out many great CEOs. That can make it a slightly hostile environment for the neophyte, however.

I met CCP Games' Chief Marketing Officer, David Reid, just before the launch of Rubicon, its latest expansion pack. In the corner of the hotel suite was a reclining chair and the newly sleek and sinister high-definition Oculus Rift VR headset, of which more later.

I mentioned that EVE had been sold to me as a game in which you "won" by making life so grindingly unpleasant for the people you were targeting that they quit the game. Understandably, he disagreed strongly. The statistics seem to back him up - unusually for massively multiplayer online games, and in particular for subscription-based games, where even the mighty World of Warcraft is slowly losing players, EVE Online has grown its user base for each of its ten years of existence.

At 500,000 active users, this is still a long way from World of Warcraft's 7.6 million paying customers, but it represents a solid base of paying customers. And, in terms of monetization, CCP has managed to combine a $14.95 (€14.95 or £9.95) subscription fee with in-game purchases in a fascinating way, based on an approximation of a real economy.

Mined the gap - mining for valuable resources in EVE Online

Reid explained:

One of the things we think has made a difference is that we build it as a sandbox game. If you think back to those Vikings [CCP is based in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland] early on, trying to compete with Activision and Electronic Arts, they knew that they would never be able to build a game that matched them on a pure content basis. There was no amount of content they could write that would enable them to keep up with hundred-plus person teams. So as a result that led to the idea of creating a game where the players made the content.

[There is a] traditional "theme park" approach, where a designer produces a narrative, with a story and dungeons and quests that they set up for you to play through - and where now choice in these kinds of games is often more of an illusion of choice. I can pick from a couple of different endings, but I'm not really changing the game.

[Anyone interpreting this as a comment on heavily scripted space opera like Mass Effect 3 is probably free to do so.]

With EVE Online, every action a player takes leaves an impact, and that affects the hundreds of thousands of other players - it's not a sharded game, like most MMOs [i.e. one in which different instances of the world exist, with players divided between them according to geography and personal taste]. So, that's the basics of how we got started.

That freedom does allow for trolling and griefing on an epic scale, of course. Much of the narrative around EVE relies not on the world-building (four spacefaring empires jockey for position in a distant galaxy), but the tales of ganking, complex alliances and sudden betrayals among the player-led syndicates and consortia. Reid acknowledges the issue, but notes that players can choose, to an extent, their level of exposure to the lawless outer reaches, where the player-led consortia reign supreme.

A fleet of ships built by recently emancipated Minmatar Republic

In the inner worlds (High-Sec), violence between players triggers a police response from the computer-controlled empire - "They may not get there in time - it's a lot like the real world in some ways - but they will come, and you will get a criminal record." Some players, who lack the time or the commitment to involve themselves heavily in the player-run consortia that thrive in the outlands, spend most of their time here, building up businesses in relative safety and making runs to fight computer-controlled enemies.

Further out, in Low-Sec, the reach of the empires is attenuated, and the police, although present, are less likely to respond - but the prizes are greater. Finally, Null-Sec is the real wild frontier, where player alliances with colorful titles like the Goonswarm and the Cluster**** Coalition (to be exact, the former is a member of the latter) mine the richest asteroid fields, raid each other and form and break alliances.

Rubicon introduces the ability for players to build stargates and explore new galaxies

Even in the wilds of Libertarian Null-Sec, though, balances of power exist, which of course need to be disrupted to keep the game interesting. Enter Rubicon, the latest free-with-subscription expansion pack, which opens up unexplored space by giving players the ability - at vast expense - to begin the process of building their own stargates, opening up new areas for colonization and exploitation.

Rubicon's an interesting expansion for us. It comes at a unique time in the EVE universe. At FanFest in Reykjavik last year we announced that we were going to begin a multi-expansion arc giving players the resource and the blueprints to construct their own stargates, and go forth into new galaxies.

The EVE universe is already a pretty big place - 7,000 solar systems, more than 10,000 planets. We opened up wormhole space in an expansion called Apocrypha in 2009, but other than that there's really been no new geography to the universe. And so with Rubicon we begin that process of giving players the ability to open up stargates to these new galaxies and to be the first to colonize them.

So it will add a bit of gameplay that really hasn't been there since the launch, in many ways.

These unclaimed worlds will be incredibly expensive to reach, and incredibly rewarding to those who reach them. So, looking at the way Capitalism works in our world, I ask Reid how this will do anything other than entrench the status quo, with the most powerful consortia being first to the new riches made available in Rubicon. The answer is classical entrepreneurialism - or, if you'd rather, greed and betrayal.

We try very hard not to take an active hand - so we won't try to prevent that. The interesting stories around EVE have often come from trust and duplicity. Even the biggest corporations are vulnerable to this - where it only takes one maverick inside the highest echelons to think 'Hmmm - why am I working for these guys? I could do my own thing'... and that begins a whole new level of space opera and interpersonal conflict.

I think, as Rubicon progresses, the value of these resources is going to become more and more obvious, and you'll see people get more and more entrepreneurial as they start thinking about whether to stay with the groups they're in. EVE is probably the most interesting universe out there, but it's going to get a lot more interesting over the coming years.

The Russian-Scandinavian War

When he says "interesting", Reid primarily means "bloody". For plot and gameplay reasons, pilots (or "capsuleers") - the player characters - are effectively immortal. But the ship they have lost remains destroyed. Vast space battles - over territory, bragging rights or just to keep the game interesting - grind vast fleets into scrap and salvage. These stakes lead to some odd alliances.

Geography matters. A lot of the big corporations go out of their way to recruit people in different timezones. The Oceanic time zone is in high demand from a lot of syndicates in North America and Europe, because you want to have somebody watching the shop when everyone else is sleeping!

So, that single-shard environment means that there is always something happening.

One of the earliest moments of emerging gameplay in EVE was in the first six months - what we call the Russian-Scandinavian War.

The idea of EVE when we built it was that you had High Security, Low Security and Null Security. Null Security had computer-controlled pirates, which were stronger than any individual player. So, the idea is that players would spend a year or so in High-Sec, would build up resources and would then go out and push the pirates out of Null-Sec.

Of course, what happened was that on day one everybody went to Null-Sec, and tried to kill the pirates, but couldn't. And since this was 2003, and we had a very different Internet, a lot of the corporations ended up being geographically based. I would go to my friend or neighbor and ask him to play EVE with me, rather than finding a group on the Internet.

As a result, clusters of systems in the universe were governed by particular nationalities. There was a heavy concentration of Russians on the right-hand side of the universe, and they were alongside a Scandinavian group of players, who had a group of French and Benelux players on their left, and a group of Americans up at the top of the map.

We didn't launch the game with Russian localization, and we didn't have Unicode support (i.e. for cyrillic lettering), but a group of industrious Russians worked out how to hack the client and were able to communicate among themselves. The problem was that when they tried to communicate with someone else, it just came up as triangles, gibberish and ASCII code.

As a result, a lot of their communications with other groups led to war - and that's how the Russian-Scandinavian war began.

The Russians were more numerous, they were better organised, and yet they couldn't push the Scandinavians out of the sector they were trying to get. And it was a while until they realised what was happening - which was that the Americans were funnelling resources through the High-Security zone to the Scandinavians, which was allowing them to fight off the Russians. So the Russians struck a deal with some of the French players to attack the Americans, cutting the supply lines and allowing them victory over the Scandinavians.

And all this, of course, is something that the people at CCP have no idea is happening. This is the first 6 months of the game, they're patching bugs, pulling all-nighters. they only discover this from propaganda websites and emails that people are sending to the company.

Pirates attack, away from the protection of the four empires

The battle of Asakai

As CCP's team became more familiar with their own game, their understanding of the ebbs and flows of factional combat developed. In some cases, factions politely notified them ahead of time of planned attacks, so that they could prepare for the load on their server. At other times, massive engagements happened through poor judgement - or terrible luck:

We watch how many people there are in any particular system. And sometimes we know from the forums that something is brewing in place X. Other times it's just an utter surprise.

Earlier this year, in January, a guy was flying a
Titan - about the most valuable ship in EVE - and accidentally hit the wrong button on his keyboard. So, instead of following his friends to one system, he found himself completely alone in a fairly unremarkable system called Asakai. And he was sitting there in his Titan, and you can imagine the thoughts running through his head. "Oops! Maybe nobody noticed..."

We were able to look at the population graph of Asakai. Nothing, nothing, nothing... then dud! Dud! Dud! Dud! Dud! - thousands of players showed up. It was just a dogpile on this guy and his Titan, and one of the most valuable ships in EVE was just decimated.

The battle escalated into a titanic struggle, not least due to a feature introduced in 2011, time dilation. To prevent arbitrary advantage being conferred by server delays and glitches under the load of ships in one place, "TiDi" slows the action in the affected sector down - so, orders that should take a minute take ten minutes in relative time. This, along with a degree of old-fashioned lag, had the side effect of giving those outside the sector time to get there, and those in the battle ample time to strategize.

So, an initial engagement between the Asakai garrison and the Titan swelled as the rescue party attempted to destroy the Heavy Interdictor, the ship which was preventing it from jumping away again, and both sides reinforced, with scavengers and opportunists arriving at the edges of the battle to pick up salvage. By the end of the battle, three Titan-class ships in the rescue party had been destroyed, along with not much shy of a thousand other ships.

That was what we now call the Battle of Asakai. I met this guy at FanFest [the annual EVE Online event in Reykjavik] - his player name is Dabigredboat- and he said "Yeah, I'm that guy, you're welcome". It created this tremendous PR moment, because it was a hugely valuable ship that kind of got destroyed by mistake. But it was all part of the internal consistency of the rules of the sandbox. There was no easy do-over. That doesn't happen in the EVE Universe.

A sped-up video of the opening part of the battle can be viewed here - but it contains the captains of the ships attacking the Titan swearing, not surprisingly, like sailors. Be warned.

The economics of space opera

So, we have a classic economic model here - companies get bigger and bigger, and at some point come into conflict with their former parent and other player. It's like
Microsoft, Gabe Newell and Valve, if Newell had a fleet of giant starships.

And if anybody does, it is he.

Of course, one very good way to break an economic system is to dump a huge amount of wealth into it. The stargates will consume resources, but to prevent massive inflation, and thus the progressive devaluation of these hard-fought-for new resources, either CCP has to step in with a fix delivered from above, or value has to be taken out of the world.

Or, to use the language of the Chicago School, things have to go boom. Reid added some detail on the money cycle:

There is a sort of infernal machine. I go out, I gather resources. I use those resources to build weapons of war. I take my starship and ammunition and dropsuits to the roughest part of the EVE universe, I take them into combat and they get destroyed. Or my opponent is destroyed. You can harvest a certain amount of resources back from that, and then you go out and then you continue your mining, or what have you - your industry – to build the next ship.

It's the reason why on some level the EVE economy is a pretty real economy from a textbook perspective - it's not susceptible to some of the real shocks that happen in the real world, but is a very supply and demand-driven economy.

As an example, the currency that we use is called PLEX. The idea behind Plex is that I as a gamer can buy a month's subscription. I can pay for that with PLEX, or I can convert it into an in-game item that I can sell on the open market. And when another player buys that with in-game currency, they can use that item to pay for subscription time. So, that provides a very early free-to-play mechanic, but more importantly it reinforces the idea that stuff doesn't just magically appear.

If your ship blows up, it doesn't respawn. You have to buy a new one. And this is where the real in-game currency sink happens, through that infernal machine.

And if somebody is broken by that machine - if they lose their irreplacably precious ship by treachery, or their riches to embezzlement or fraud - CCP's policy is laissez-faire. Are they never tempted to intervene with a Troubled Assets Relief Space Package?

Actually, no - and beyond that, if we start to tiptoe in that direction, the community calls us out! We have people who have played EVE from the beginning, and there is a very real internal consistency to how the sandbox has been governed. The invisible hand of the economy tends to work itself out.

So, the price of PLEX may skyrocket, and we wonder if this is a problem, but in general it turns out that it's not. In general, this thing has worked itself out pretty well. And the way we think about it is that the designers of most games are the gods. At CCP we want the players to be the stars, and we are more like the custodians or the janitors. We keep the lights on, we provide more tools for the players to use, but we don't dictate what should be happening. We don't try to make corporations or alliances behave in a particular way.

And some of the most interesting success stories of EVE have come from people who utterly tried to disrupt the fabric of how we operate things. The Goonswarm is a perfect example - a group of people who came out of the Something Awful forums who said 'We're going to play EVE, and we're going to kill it'. And as it turned out, they became some of the best EVE players ever!

Im the real world, you can make judgments about whether something is a good are a bad thing. We're only looking at the absolute value of these things. We're not judging whether something is good or bad. We're looking at the absolute value. If something's happening, it's good. That's our measure. When things are quiet in EVE, that's when I as a businessman worry.

Of course, there are terms of service. There's a EULA. Don't break laws. But outside of that, the EVE universe is a wild frontier where you can pretty much do what you want.

EVE's New Eden is populated by human and post-human life, so there are no major alien species. However, the Gallente - democratic, freedom-loving, creative and liberal - are basically Elves. Or the Welsh. Or Welsh Elves. Best kind.

Plex appeal

PLEX - the currency of EVE Online - is interesting in itself. PLEX can be bought with real-world cash. One use for PLEX is to extend a player's subscription for one month (PLEX stands for Pilot's License Extension). So, a purchased PLEX can be immediately traded for a month of play, although it is significantly cheaper to pay the subscription in dollars. However, it can also be traded within the game, like any other item, for ISK, the universal internal currency of the game. Named for the Icelandic Krone, ISK is the go-to currency, whereas Plex is something a little more... liminal.

So, PLEX can be bought with real-world cash or with ISK. ISK can only be generated and sold within the game. There is no way to remove money directly from the EVE universe, although PLEX can be used to purchase certain items in the real world, such as tickets to CCP gaming events.

Last year CCP offered 100 NVIDIA GTX560 graphics cards for purchase with PLEX, creating a brief spike in prices before the offer was exhausted. This year, they just finished a charitable drive for victims of disaster in the Philippines; donations of Plex in-game to a computer-controlled character were then matched by CCP in reality, raising $185,175.

In the general run of things, however, once real-world cash goes into the game, it cannot be pulled out again, although Reid acknowledges that black markets exist:

We keep a pretty close eye on what's happening in the community. We do have an API layer, CREST, where third-party developers are able to make applications that interact with the EVE universe, and allow people to trade.

We have an internal affairs department, we have a security department. We think we've kept it pretty clean, but humans are the most interesting species. I'm sure someone's doing stuff they aren't supposed to...

And if anyone was looking to test the boundaries of "stuff they aren't supposed to", of course, it is indubitably EVE Online, where behavior that would lead to expulsion from other games is ignored by CCP as a matter of policy.

Like that Ponzi scheme, in which two enterprising players persuaded others to invest ISK with them, offering a 5% return. The early investors did indeed get their 5% return. And then, after 1.8 trillion ISK had been invested, they disappeared, leaving a note:

Most likely, this will cause a lot of questions.

The most important question will be answered right here, right now.

The ISK is gone; you will not see it ever again.

You've invested it, got a chance (sic) on some profit, but it turned out to be not the best choice you've ever made. That's how investing works. At least, that's how it went for the most (sic) of you.

That ISK could not have been taken out of the game - but somebody could have bought many, many years worth of free play, in the form of PLEX. Or that PLEX could have been used to buy a third currency, Aurum.

Aurum is specifically used to buy cosmetic improvements - garments for your character (the introduction and pricing of these elements caused some complaint, but an equilibrium seems to have been reached). These clothes can be worn and, when you grow tired of them, sold for ISK, which can then be used to buy PLEX - and so on. ISK is the fluid currency - extracted from the universe by mining, and used to buy spaceships and weapons - which are them destroyed, creating the need for more ISK, and so on.

Somebody with a sufficiently senior position in EVE Online, then, may never have to pay to play again - their mercantile or criminal empire will bring them enough ISK to buy PLEX within the game. Conversely, a captain suddenly and brutally deprived of his pride and joy at Asakai might have bought a PLEX and sold it to that wealthy syndic in order to have the ISK to buy and upgrade a new ship.

Compared with games in which loot "spawns" - dropping from defeated enemies - this is a relatively closed system, Reid explained, with PLEX providing a membrane for Earth money to pass into the game.

The resources you are getting by selling your PLEX have been earned by the sweat of somebody else's brow. It isn't a fairy godmother thing of just buying money that appears in the universe.

Aurum has another use, however - in the spin-off game Dust 514, it can turn a neophyte space marine into a killing machine. In the second part of this interview, Reid talks about Dust 514, Valkyrie, and extending the world of EVE to new audiences, new frontiers and new ways of killing - and making a killing. Click here for Part 2.

I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.